links for 2010-06-19

Kevin: "The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014." Also according to the Newspaper Association of America, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009.

Kevin: Tim Armstrong at AOL had wanted to buy Associated Content in the spring of 2009. Time Warner, which was in the process of spinning off AOL, said no. After the deal fell apart, the chair of Associated, Mike Perlis of Softbank, used his network to make overtures to Yahoo. It's a master class on how business networking works, and a great example of 'it's not what you know but who you know'. It also shows the deep networks in Silicon Valley. Yahoo was looking to expand its content offerings (again), and after an audit of Associated's content, they were sold. What is very interesting is this line in the story: Yahoo Media boss Jimmy Pitaro is "itching to use Associated Content freelancers to create niche verticals with endemic advertising".

Kevin: Gary Andrews looks at how The Sun in the UK played an own goal in its attempts to engage bloggers to flesh out its coverage. After contacting bloggers and asking whether they would like to participate in their coverage, The Sun went ahead whether the bloggers gave permission or not. Chris Taylor from "It'll Be Off wrote to Gary: "I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.” Rights seem only to apply to media companies not to content creators.

Kevin: Mel Taylor Media doesn't mince words in criticising Gannett Broadcasting, the local television win on US publishing giant Gannett, in its decision to outsource local web sales efforts to DataSphere, or in the words of the post, is "putting some of their local web sales efforts on auto pilot". The post describers DataSphere as the "master of call-center web sales and quickie blogs". The post quotes a Borrell Associates report published in 2003 looking at the Disruption of Local Media. "The key take-away from this 7 year old, Borrell report? As long as a traditional media manager is calling the shots at the local media website, it will most certainly fail."